


Storm Warning

by thedevilchicken



Category: Original Work
Genre: Lighthouses, M/M, Mermaids, Napoleonic Wars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-17 05:48:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21049316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Wounded in the war, Étienne is offered a new position: keeping the lighthouse at Eaux-les-Rochers.Every year, a storm comes in. With it comes a creature he never thought he'd see with his own eyes.





	Storm Warning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greygerbil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/gifts).

There's a storm coming. He felt it in the air even before the sky turned grey and the clouds began to gather, but now it's undeniable: there's lightning on the horizon, great bolts that look like cracks straight through to heaven, and the rain is moving in. He can see it out there, falling like a curtain, and the waves have started to rise. At their height, they'll cover the jetty where he's sitting, but he'll be inside by then. He'll be tending the lamp and lenses to warn stray sailors off the rocks, and he won't be alone. At least he hopes he won't be.

-

The lighthouse at Eaux-les-Rochers had stood in one form or another for more than three hundred years by the time that Étienne was employed to keep it. 

It's the tallest lighthouse along the Atlantic coast of France. It's relatively stout in comparison with some of its better-known cousins, but the view from the top of the tower and out over the rocky islands is still more than enough to impress. The original tower had been burned to the ground by a lightning strike, so the previous keeper's stories went, and its direct successor had been built up around the charred remains, then added to over the years until it stood there in its present form. All official records of the first tower had long since been lost by the time he arrived, but the room that Étienne sleeps in still has scorched stone walls. He believes the story.

It's the tallest lighthouse on the west coast, but the fact is it's an important one - important enough that when he was wounded in the line of duty aboard a frigate of the Emperor's Navy and could no longer put to sea as a navigator, he was offered a new post keeping their ships off the rocks. The sea around Eaux-les-Rochers is treacherous, after all, and he had no home to return to. The war had seen to that.

He accepted the post gladly, and he made his way overland to the coast from Paris, where he had spent the latter part of his convalescence. At the coast, he was conveyed by rowboat to the island at the mouth of the bay. The old keeper, a bluff man by then in his seventies, showed him what to do for a little over a week and then left him there with a neatly handwritten manual and enough food to last a month or so. When the food was running low, a boat came from the shore with more, and a fresh supply of oil for the lamp. 

"Watch out for the merfolk," the old keeper told him as he left. Considering the man's odd sense of humour, Étienne wasn't sure whether he meant that or not. 

Étienne was forty-three years old. His predecessor had retired at seventy-two. After the first three months, he wasn't sure if he'd make it a year, let alone twenty-nine of them; he'd never minded solitude but the island was a different kind of solitude, and likely one that had made the previous keeper's sense of humour what it was. 

But he was nothing if not a patriot, even after losing all he'd lost. He would do his duty or die in the commissioning of it.

-

When the storm came in the first year, Étienne was unprepared. The manual was vague on the subject of storms and while he'd have been perfectly at home on board a ship afloat on a stormy sea, a stormy island scoured by waves was quite a different matter. But he kept the lamp burning, and came to understand that was his one and only purpose. His life was not worth more than those of men at sea.

When the storm came in the second year, he was much better prepared. One of the stores was flooded by it, and his rowing boat was swept away from its mooring at the jetty, but he understood his duty: first and foremost, he was to tend the lamp. Where he'd stumbled across his purpose that first time, this time he knew it well. 

When the storm came in the third year, then the fourth year, he knew his business better still. And then, in the fifth year, as dawn came through the clouds, he saw a man on the rocks. He shouldn't have left the lighthouse but he did exactly that, trusting that his careful work would keep the lantern burning. He pulled on a coat and he made his way to the windswept rocks and he pulled the man away from the edge, so he could not be swept away to sea. It was only once he really looked at him, once he wasn't on the verge of disappearance, that he understood; he hadn't saved a man at all. 

He was unconscious, and he was bleeding. He pulled him up to the lighthouse, wrapped up in his coat so the loose shale wouldn't bite at his skin, the weight of him quite something and it pulled uncomfortably at Étienne's wounded shoulder, good day as he'd been having with it. When Étienne stitched his wounds, probably torn by the rocks he'd been swept up onto, he didn't flinch because he didn't wake, but he could see he was breathing at the very least. He seemed to be warm to the touch despite the chill in the air so Étienne just kept his skin damp and let him rest. After all, he'd never seen a merman before. The bones of one kept in pride of place in a Caribbean inn very much did not count.

He'd like to say all he did was keep an eye on him while he tended the lamp, but he didn't. He examined him for other injuries, and he examined him well. His hands had thick, dark membranes webbed between the fingers and where legs should have been he had a long grey tail, like a thick-hided shark's. He had dark hair that hung past his shoulders, all strung with shells and full of salt as it started to dry. He seemed younger than Étienne was himself, perhaps thirty, but that was hard to say with any certainty; perhaps he was as old as the lighthouse was, or older. He didn't expect he'd ever be able to ask him, given what the tales said of merfolk.

By the time he woke two full days later, the storm had passed, and while the sky was still a deep, dark grey, the rain had very nearly stopped. He opened his eyes, eyelids sweeping back farther than a human's could, and for a moment all that Étienne could see was black circles within the round sockets. When he opened his mouth, which stretched too wide across his face for any human, it was full of sharp, jagged teeth. He'd heard stories of men being carried to their deaths down in the blackness of the sea. He'd heard stories of merfolk taking hands or feet or other chunks of men, in places where fishing had depleted their usual supply of food. He'd heard stories, of course, but he'd never thought he'd see one living. 

"Are you going to kill me?" the merman asked. His accent was strange, sibilant, nothing that Étienne could place, and the fact he spoke French was perhaps more startling than the fact he'd spoken at all.

"Why would I do that?"

"It's what your kind usually does to mine." Then he looked down at the relatively neat row of stitches down his side. He gestured to it with one webbed hand. "You did this? Why?"

"You were bleeding. There was a storm. I'm afraid it was all I could do." 

"I need to leave." 

"Let me help you." 

He had no choice but to accept Étienne's help to get back down to the sea and when they got there, he expected that would be the last he'd see of him. But not even a week had passed when he saw him bobbing in the waves just off the coast, and Étienne raised a hand to wave. A couple more times and the merman waved back, though the motion seemed jerky and unpracticed. Another month and Étienne almost made it to the water's edge before he darted away again.

The next storm caught him in the boat back to the island from the mainland. When the towering waves capsized the boat, he believed he was about to die, more truly than he ever had before. But when he woke some time later, the real surprise wasn't that he was still alive, and somehow also not that the merman had saved him. 

The surprise was how he kissed him with that too-wide mouth before he swam away. The surprise was that he wished he could have made him stay. 

-

Years have passed. And with each one, with the storm, he returns.

Now, another storm approaches, and as night sets in he keeps the lighthouse lamp shining bright. Sailors out there on the sea rely on him to keep them safe; sailors just like he was once but can never be again. 

He knows his duty, and he should wish the storm away with all his heart. But he can't help but feel a flush of pleasure when he sees him bobbing in the crashing waves.


End file.
